Charles Dutoit Conductor Truls Mørk Cello Stravinsky Chant funèbre

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1 PROGRAM ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-SIXTH SEASON Chicago Symphony Orchestra Riccardo Muti Zell Music Director Yo-Yo Ma Judson and Joyce Green Creative Consultant Thursday, April 6, 2017, at 8:00 Friday, April 7, 2017, at 1:30 Saturday, April 8, 2017, at 8:00 Tuesday, April 11, 2017, at 7:30 Charles Dutoit Conductor Truls Mørk Cello Stravinsky Chant funèbre United States premiere Dvořák Cello Concerto in B Minor, Op. 104 Allegro Adagio ma non troppo Finale: Allegro moderato TRULS MØRK INTERMISSION Prokofiev Symphony No. 5 in B-flat Major, Op. 100 Andante Allegro moderato Adagio Allegro giocoso These performances honor the memory of Marcia S. Cohn and her family s generosity to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Saturday evening s concert is sponsored by DLA Piper. Tuesday series concerts are sponsored by United Airlines. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra is grateful to WBBM Newsradio 780 and FM for their generous support as media sponsors of the Tuesday series. This program is partially supported by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council Agency and the National Endowment for the Arts.

2 COMMENTS by Phillip Huscher Igor Stravinsky Born June 17, 1882; Oranienbaum, Russia Died April 6, 1971; New York City Chant funèbre At our concerts this week, Chant funèbre (Funeral song), an important orchestral score by the young Stravinsky that was presumed lost for more than a century, is being performed in this country for the first time. Stravinsky composed Chant funèbre in 1908 as a memorial for his teacher, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. It was performed just once, in 1909, before the manuscript and the orchestra parts were lost. The score of this work unfortunately disappeared in Russia during the Revolution, along with many other things which I had left there, Stravinsky later wrote. Eventually all but forgotten, Chant funèbre has nonetheless been a source of fascination among music historians as one of the composer s most significant early scores. It is the main link between Fireworks (the 1908 composition that is the first work by Stravinsky that the Chicago Symphony Orchestra ever played) and The Firebird, his first international success in I can no longer remember the music, Stravinsky wrote in his 1936 autobiography,... but I can remember the idea at the root of its conception, which was that all the solo instruments of the orchestra filed past the tomb of the master in succession, each laying down its own melody as its wreath against a deep background of tremolo murmurings simulating the vibrations of bass voices singing in a chorus. Stravinsky had a close and complex relationship with Rimsky-Korsakov. As Stravinsky was composing Fireworks in the spring of 1908, he often went to see his beloved teacher, mentor, and recently appointed father figure: He seemed to like my visits, Stravinsky later wrote. He had my deep affection, and I was genuinely attached to him. It seems that these sentiments were reciprocated, but it was only later that I learned so from his family. His characteristic reserve had never allowed him to make any sort of display of his feelings. One day, Stravinsky mentioned to Rimsky-Korsakov that he was writing an orchestral fantasy. Rimsky-Korsakov told him to send it to him as soon as it was ready. Stravinsky did, but a few days later he received a telegram saying that Rimsky-Korsakov had died, and shortly afterwards his registered package was returned, marked Not delivered on account of death of addressee. It was then that he sat down and began to compose this chant funèbre. In his Memories and Commentaries of 1960 Stravinsky was seventy-eight at the time he wrote, I remember the piece as the best of my works before The Firebird, and the most advanced in chromatic harmony. The orchestral parts must have been preserved in one of the Saint Petersburg orchestra libraries; I wish someone in Above: Stravinsky postcard photograph, ca COMPOSED 1908 FIRST PERFORMANCES January 30, 1909; Saint Petersburg, Russia December 2, 2016; Saint Petersburg, Russia (after rediscovery) INSTRUMENTATION three flutes and piccolo, two oboes and english horn, three clarinets and bass clarinet, three bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones and tuba, timpani, cymbals, bass drum, tam-tam, two harps, strings APPROXIMATE PERFORMANCE TIME 12 minutes These are the United States premiere performances. 2

3 Leningrad would look for the parts, for I would be curious myself to see what I was composing just before The Firebird. A s it turned out, Chant funèbre lay buried just where Stravinsky suspected, although it was discovered forty-four years too late to satisfy his curiosity and correct his shaky memory of the music itself (in 1960, he said he thought it was scored for winds alone, although it is in fact for full orchestra). Little more than a year ago, the uncataloged, professionally copied orchestral parts to Chant funèbre were discovered in storage in the Saint Petersburg Conservatory, after several unsuccessful searches through the chaotically organized archives over the years by the musicologist and Stravinsky specialist Natalia Braginskaya. It was only in the fall of 2015, when the entire Photograph taken at the home of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. From left to right, Stravinsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, his daughter Nadezhda and her fiancé Maximilian Steinberg, and Stravinsky s wife Yekaterina building was emptied for renovation, that the librarian uncovered piles of manuscripts that had been buried for decades. There Braginskaya found what she had long been looking for it was the discovery of a lifetime. The orchestral parts for Chant funèbre contain players markings and corrections thought to be in the composer s hand. Braginskaya immediately began to reconstruct the full score. In just 106 measures, marked Largo assai, and mostly in 6/4 time, the twenty-six-year-old composer presents a dark and luminous funeral song of great power a testament to the depth of affection he felt for his teacher. There are hints of the fierce and startling music to follow in the next four years, beginning with The Firebird and continuing with Petrushka and The Rite of Spring. Braginskaya calls the Chant funèbre a slow unvarying processional with contrasting instrumental timbres: a dialogue of sonorities, very much as Stravinsky himself vaguely remembered it in his autobiography twenty-five years later. The first performance since 1909 was given on December 2, 2016, in the same hall where it was played once before Saint Petersburg s Mariinsky Theatre, rebuilt and reconfigured since Stravinsky s time with Valery Gergiev leading the Mariinsky Orchestra. The concert was filmed for television and streamed live. The Chicago performances this week unexpectedly add yet another work to the Orchestra s list of important compositions it has introduced to this country. 3

4 Antonín Dvořák Born September 8, 1841; Nelahozeves, Bohemia Died May 1, 1904; Prague, Bohemia Cello Concerto in B Minor, Op. 104 It was Victor Herbert, the composer of Babes in Toyland and Naughty Marietta, who inspired Dvořák to write the most beloved cello concerto in the repertoire. We owe this historical curiosity, along with some of Dvořák s most popular music, to Jeannette M. Thurber, the wife of a New York wholesale grocer, who exhausted her husband s millions establishing an Englishlanguage opera company that folded and a national conservatory of music that flourished long enough to entice Dvořák to settle temporarily in the New World. The composer agreed to serve as director of her school for $15,000, and when he arrived in 1892, Victor Herbert was the head of the cello department. Herbert, who had come to the United States from Vienna only six years before, was highly regarded as a cellist, conductor, and composer, though he hadn t yet written the first of the forty operettas that would make him enormously popular. In 1892, Dvořák was as famous as any composer alive. Taking on an administrative title and a heavy teaching schedule was probably an unfortunate waste of his time and talents, although the music Dvořák wrote in this country includes some of his best: a string quartet and a string quintet (both entitled American) composed in Spillville, Iowa; the New World Symphony; and this cello concerto. For several years, Dvořák had been unmoved by a request from his friend Hanuš Wihan, the cellist of the Bohemian Quartet, to write a cello concerto. During his second year at the National Conservatory, Dvořák attended the premiere of Victor Herbert s Second Cello Concerto, given by the New York Philharmonic on March 9, It is difficult today to know why this long-forgotten score made such a deep impression on him, for Herbert was hardly an overwhelming or influential talent. But Dvořák enthusiastically applauded Herbert s concerto, and he heard something in it that made him think, for the first time, that there was important music to be written for solo cello and orchestra. This concerto would prove to be the last major symphonic work of his career. On April 28, 1894, Dvořák signed a new two-year contract with the conservatory. After spending the summer holiday in Bohemia, he returned to New York on November 1; a week later he began this concerto. While he was writing the second movement, he received word that his sister-in-law, Josefina Kaunitzová (with Above: Portrait of Dvořák by Jan Vilímek, from his collection of prominent Czech artists, ca. 1890s COMPOSED November 8, 1894 February 9, 1895; revised June 1895 FIRST PERFORMANCE March 19, 1896; London, England. The composer conducting INSTRUMENTATION solo cello, two flutes and piccolo, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, three horns, two trumpets, three trombones and tuba, timpani, triangle, strings 4 APPROXIMATE PERFORMANCE TIME 40 minutes FIRST CSO PERFORMANCES January 29 and 30, 1897, Auditorium Theatre. Leo Stern as soloist, Theodore Thomas conducting July 15, 1939, Ravinia Festival. Emanuel Feuermann as soloist, Vladimir Golschmann conducting MOST RECENT CSO PERFORMANCES August 14, 2009, Ravinia Festival. Yo-Yo Ma as soloist, James Conlon conducting May 5 and 6, 2012, Orchestra Hall. Yo-Yo Ma as soloist, Carlos Miguel Prieto conducting CSO RECORDINGS Emanuel Feuermann as soloist, Hans Lange conducting. CSO (From the Archives, vol. 10: Great Soloists) Jacqueline du Pré as soloist, Daniel Barenboim conducting. Angel

5 whom he had once been in love), was seriously ill. As a tribute to her, he quoted at length one of her favorite melodies, Kéž duch můj sám (Leave me alone), the first of his Four Songs, op. 82. He completed the concerto on February 9 (his son Otakar s tenth birthday), at 11:30 in the morning. After the premiere of the New World Symphony in 1893, Dvořák said, I know that if I had not seen America I never would have written my new symphony. The cello concerto shows no such outward signs of the composer s American experience it doesn t imitate the rhythms and melodies of the native music he heard in the United States and has often been accepted as an early warning sign of his homesickness. In fact, once Dvořák returned to Bohemia for the summer of 1895, with his new concerto in his bags, he realized that he couldn t leave his homeland again; in August, he wrote to Mrs. Thurber asking to be released from his contract. Since he had already contributed so much to American music, including a symphony as popular as any ever written, she could not refuse. The unveiling of the Cello Concerto, the last of Dvořák s American products, belongs to the final chapter of his life: the premiere was given in London in March 1896, with the composer Jeannette Thurber ( ), founder of the National Conservatory of Music of America The National Conservatory of Music of America, founded in 1885 by Jeannette Thurber, and located on West 25th Street, New York City conducting. (The first American performance was not given until December.) The literature for solo cello and orchestra isn t extensive. At best, Dvořák can t have known more than the single concertos by Haydn (a second was discovered in 1961) and Schumann, the first of Saint-Saëns s two, and Tchaikovsky s Rococo Variations for cello and orchestra. (He also knew the Triple Concerto by Beethoven and the Double Concerto by Brahms.) Dvořák had written one long-winded cello concerto in his youth and later said he thought little of the cello as a solo instrument ( High up it sounds nasal, and low down it growls ). Now, with little previous inclination and few useful models, Dvořák gave the form its finest example. Brahms is reported to have said, Why on earth didn t I know that one could write a cello concerto like this? Had I known, I would have written one long ago. T he first movement of Dvořák s Cello Concerto is as impressive as anything in the composer s output. The music is long and expansive. The orchestral exposition commits the textbook sin of traveling to a foreign key for the second subject a luxury traditionally saved for the soloist but Dvořák s theme is so magnificent (the critic Donald Tovey called it one of the most beautiful passages ever written for the horn ) that it can justify the risk. Dvořák later admitted the melody meant a great deal to him. Once the soloist enters, the music grows richer and more fanciful. The development section dissolves into simple lyricism. By the recapitulation, Dvořák is writing his own rules: he bypasses his first theme and goes straight for the big horn melody, as if he couldn t wait to hear it again. The movement is all the stronger for its daring and unconventional architecture. 5

6 Dvořák s progress on the slow movement was sidetracked by the memory of Josefina, and, as a result, the music he wrote is interrupted midway by the poignant song she loved. The depth of his feeling for her, often debated and sometimes denied, is painfully clear. Josefina died soon after Dvořák permanently returned to Bohemia, and, hearing the news, he took this jaunty rondo finale down from the shelf and added a long, contemplative coda as a memorial. The concerto still ends in high spirits, but it s no longer the same piece Dvořák took home from the New World. Sergei Prokofiev Born April 23, 1891; Sontsovka, Ukraine Died March 5, 1953; Nikolina Gora, near Moscow, Russia Symphony No. 5 in B-flat Major, Op. 100 Sergei Prokofiev spent the summer of 1944 at a large country estate provided by the Union of Soviet Composers as a refuge from the war and as a kind of think tank. Prokofiev arrived early in the summer and found that his colleagues included Glière, Shostakovich, Kabalevsky, Khachaturian, and Miaskovsky summer camp for the most distinguished Soviet composers of the time. Although Ivanovo, as the retreat was called, often was referred to as a rest home, there was little leisure once Prokofiev moved in. He maintained a rigorous daily schedule as he had all his life and began to impose it on the others as well. The regularity with which he worked amazed us all, Khachaturian later recalled. Prokofiev ate breakfast, marched to his studio to compose, and scheduled his walks and tennis games by the clock. In the evening, he insisted the composers all get together to compare notes, literally. Prokofiev was delighted, and clearly not surprised, that he usually had the most to show for his day s work. It was a particularly productive summer for Prokofiev he composed both his Eighth Piano Sonata and the Fifth Symphony before he returned to Moscow. The sonata is prime Prokofiev and often played, but the symphony is perhaps the best known and most regularly performed of all his works. It had been fifteen years since Prokofiev s last symphony, and both Above: Prokofiev ca COMPOSED 1944 FIRST PERFORMANCE January 13, 1945; Moscow, Russia. The composer conducting INSTRUMENTATION two flutes and piccolo, two oboes and english horn, two clarinets, E-flat clarinet and bass clarinet, two bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones and tuba, piano, harp, timpani, triangle, cymbals, tambourine, snare drum, woodblock, bass drum, tam-tam, strings APPROXIMATE PERFORMANCE TIME 46 minutes FIRST CSO PERFORMANCES November 21, 22, and 26, 1946, Orchestra Hall. George Szell conducting July 21, 1949, Ravinia Festival. Dimitri Mitropoulos conducting MOST RECENT CSO PERFORMANCES May 31 and June 3, 2014, Orchestra Hall. Jaap van Zweden conducting August 5, 2016, Ravinia Festival. Kirill Karabits conducting CSO RECORDINGS Fritz Reiner conducting. CSO (Chicago Symphony Orchestra: The First 100 Years) James Levine conducting. Deutsche Grammophon 6

7 that symphony and the one preceding it had been by products of theater pieces: the Third Symphony is musically related to the opera The Flaming Angel, and the Fourth to the ballet The Prodigal Son. Not since his Second Symphony, completed in 1925, had Prokofiev composed a purely abstract symphony, or one that he began from scratch. Although it was written at the height of the war, Prokofiev s Fifth Symphony isn t a wartime symphony in the traditional sense not in the vivid and descriptive manner of Shostakovich s Seventh, composed during the siege of Leningrad and written, in Carl Sandburg s words, with the heart s blood or his Eighth, which coolly contemplates the horrors of war. Prokofiev s Symphony no. 5 is intended to glorify the human spirit praising the free and happy man his strength, his generosity, and the purity of his soul. In its own way, this outlook makes it an even greater product of the war, because it was designed to uplift and console the Soviet people. I cannot say I chose this theme, Prokofiev wrote. It was born in me and had to express itself. Nonetheless, such optimistic and victorious music cheered the Russian authorities; it might well have been made to order. In his 1946 autobiography, Prokofiev writes: It is the duty of the composer, like the poet, the sculptor, or the painter, to serve the rest of humanity, to beautify human life, and to point the way to a radiant future. Such is the immutable code of art as I see it. It also was the code of art Soviet composers were expected to embrace during the war, but Prokofiev couldn t have written a work as powerful and convincing as his Fifth Symphony if he didn t truly believe those words. The Fifth Symphony would inevitably be known as a victory celebration. Just before the first performance, which Prokofiev conducted, word reached Moscow that the Russian army had scored a decisive victory on the Vistula River. As Prokofiev raised his baton, the sound of cannon was heard from the distance. Buoyed by both the news and the triumphant tone of the music, the premiere was a great success. It was the last time Prokofiev conducted in public. Three weeks later he had a mild heart attack, fell down the stairs in his apartment, and suffered a slight concussion. Although he recovered his spirits and eventually his strength and creative powers as well Prokofiev continued to feel the effects of the accident for the remaining eight years of his life. T he first movement of the Fifth Symphony is intense and dramatic, but neither aggressive nor violent, like much of the music written at the time. It s moderately paced (Prokofiev writes andante) and broadly lyrical throughout. The scherzo, in contrast, is quick and insistent, touched by a sense of humor that sometimes reveals a sharp, cutting edge. The third movement is lyrical and brooding, like much of Prokofiev s finest slow music. After a brief and sober introduction, the finale points decisively toward a radiant future. Phillip Huscher has been the program annotator for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra since Chicago Symphony Orchestra 7